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According to Eucherius of Lyon,[3] ca. 443–450, the garrison of the Legion was the city of Thebes, Egypt. There the Legion were quartered in the East until the emperor Maximian ordered them to march to Gaul, to assist him against the rebels of Burgundy. The Theban Legion[4] was commanded in its march by Saint Maurice (Mauritius), Candidus, Innocent, and Exuperius, all of whom are venerated as saints. At Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, then called Agaunum, the orders were given— since the Legion had refused to worship a man, to sacrifice to the Emperor— to "decimate" it by putting to death a tenth of its men. This act was repeated until none were left.

The earliest surviving document describing "the holy Martyrs who have made Aguanum illustrious with their blood" is the letter of Eucherius, which describes the succession of witnesses from the martyrdom to his time, a span of about 150 years. The bishop had made the journey to Agaunum himself, and his report of his visit multiplied a thousandfold the standard formula of the martyrologies:

We often hear, do we not, a particular locality or city is held in high honour because of one single martyr who died there, and quite rightly, because in each case the saint gave his precious soul to the most high God. How much more should this sacred place, Aguanum, be reverenced, where so many thousands of martyrs have been slain, with the sword, for the sake of Christ.

Alexander of Bergamo

As with many hagiographies, Eucherius' letter to Bishop Salvius reinforced an existing pilgrimage site. Many of the faithful were coming from diverse provinces of the empire, according to Eucherius, devoutly to honor these saints, and (important for the abbey of Aguanum) to offer presents of gold, silver and other things. He mentions many miracles, such as casting out of devils and other kinds of healing "which the power of the Lord works there every day through the intercession of his saints."[citation needed]

In the late sixth century, Gregory of Tours was convinced of the miraculous powers of the Theban Legion, though he transferred the event to Cologne, where there was an early cult devoted to Maurice and the Theban Legion:

At Cologne there is a church in which the fifty men from the holy Theban Legion are said to have consummated their martyrdom for the name of Christ. And because the church, with its wonderful construction and mosaics, shines as if somehow gilded, the inhabitants prefer to call it the "Church of the Golden Saints". Once Eberigisilus, who was at the time bishop of Cologne, was racked with severe pains in half his head. He was then in a villa near a village. Eberigisilus sent his deacon to the church of the saints. Since there was said to be in the middle of the church a pit into which the saints were thrown together after their martyrdom, the deacon collected some dust there and brought it to the bishop. As soon as the dust touched Eberigisilus' head, immediately all pain was gone.[5]

Accounts of the moral inculcated by the exemplum of the Theban Legion resonate with the immediate culture of each teller. The miraculous whole-hearted unanimity of the Legion to the last individual, was downplayed by Hugo Grotius, for whom the moral of the Theban Legion was employed to condemn atrocities committed under military orders.[6] For Donald O'Reilly, an apologist for the historicity of the account in 1978, it was "the moral issue of organized violence".[7]

According to Samir F. Girgis, writing in the Coptic Encyclopedia, there were two legions bearing the name "Theban," both of them formed by Diocletian sometime after the organization of the original Egyptian legion, stationed at Alexandria. It is not certain which of these was transferred from Egypt to Europe in order to assist Maximian in Gaul.[9]

Johan Mösch, after comparing information from the various chronicles on the events and geography of the martyrdoms of the legionnaires, concluded that only a single cohort was martyred at Agaunum. The remainder of the cohorts (battalion sized units of which there were ten to a legion) were either on the march or already stationed along the Roman road that ran from Liguria through Turin and Milan, then across Alps and down the Rhine to Colonia Agrippinensis (Cologne).[9]

L. Dupraz and Paul Müller, by examining the military titles and ranks of the legionnaires and thereby determining the total number of soldiers involved, estimated that the Thebans martyred at Agaunum consisted of but one cohort whose number did not exceed 520 men.[9] Thus the execution of an entire cohors is equivalent to decimation of a legion.

Donald F. O'Reilly argues that evidence from coins, papyrus, and Roman army lists support the story of the Theban Legion. A papyrus dated in the sixth year of our Lord the Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Probus Pius Augustus, Tubi sixteenth" (13 January 282 CE), shows the delivery of rations, which would sustain a legion for about three months, to be delivered to Panopolis to the "mobilized soldiers and sailors". Coins from Alexandria that also coincided with the same time period, were minted in a style used only when troops for a new legion were leaving port. During the trial of the martyr Maximilian it was pointed out that there were Christians serving in the Roman army and shows the existence of Theban Christian legionaries in the same units as mentioned in the Notitia Dignitatum.[10]

Denis Van Berchem, of the University of Geneva, proposed that Eucherius' presentation of the legend of the Theban legion was a literary production, not based on a local tradition;[11] by isolating its hagiographic conventions from the anachronisms of local narrative elements, he sought to demonstrate that Eucherius derived his formulas from Lactantius and Orosius and that the "decimation" was an anachronism: the practice of decimation had not been practiced for at least a century (see Ammianus Marcellinus for Julian's misinterpretation of decimation) and that service by Christians in the legions before Emperor Constantine the Great was relatively rare. David Woods, Professor of Classics at the University College Cork, alleges that the model of Maurice and the Theban Legion based on Eucherius of Lyon's letter was a complete fiction.[12]

It's possible that the legion was simply re-organized during Diocletian's re-organization of units (breaking up legions of 6000 men to create smaller units of 1000), and that some of the soldiers had been executed, and that this was where the story of the legion's destruction originated from.[10] Henri Leclercq suggests that it is quite possible that an incident at Agaunum may have had to do not with a legion, but with a simple vexillatio.[13]

^Attempts to demonstrate its historical possibility, such as Donald F. O'Reilly, "The Theban Legion of St. Maurice" Vigiliae Christianae32.3 (September 1978), pp. 195–207, reveal its continued vitality as an element of Christian legend rather than Christian mythology.

^6666 is not the normal number of soldiers in a Roman Legion, and its appearance in this context is interesting for its similarity to 666, which has a diametically opposite association as the well-known Number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation.